{"id":43458,"date":"2018-05-17T03:00:54","date_gmt":"2018-05-17T07:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43458"},"modified":"2018-05-16T18:39:01","modified_gmt":"2018-05-16T22:39:01","slug":"tom-wolfe-would-spend-the-rest-of-his-days-in-a-golden-cage-of-a-book-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/05\/17\/tom-wolfe-would-spend-the-rest-of-his-days-in-a-golden-cage-of-a-book-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Wolfe “would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the National Post<\/em> Colby Cosh<\/a> explains why Tom Wolfe was so significant in the literary world almost from his first published work:<\/p>\n

… Tom Wolfe was an educated man: unlike any of the macho novelists he was sparring with, he was entitled to adjoin an honest-to-God PhD to his byline. In the end, he could not escape the prejudices imprinted on him in youth. It is a truth universally acknowledged: a prose artist must excrete a novel to demonstrate his true mettle.<\/p>\n

Wolfe described it this way himself in a 2008 interview. \u201cOriginally, I was only going to write one novel, to prove to myself and any random doubters that I could do it.\u201d \u201cRandom doubters\u201d sounds so dismissive and calm until you remember the amount of work Wolfe was proposing to undertake in order to impress them. He continued: \u201cBut that novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/em>, was such an astounding success\u2026 I\u2019m afraid I got swept away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wolfe, I suppose, was too well-raised to utter the word \u201cmoney\u201d in front of an interviewer. (The explicit subject of all his work, his journalism and fiction, is social status: but social status and money do travel together mighty closely.) Bonfire<\/em> (1987) became one of the publishing events of the epoch, and he would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal. The dabbler in the novel had proved too much: he had proved that the novel really is still in a class by itself as a social phenomenon.<\/p>\n

More novels in the vein of Bonfire<\/em> \u2014 deeply researched, socially prescient, full of truculent conservative squareness \u2014 followed. I myself would not trade The Right Stuff<\/em>, Wolfe\u2019s 1979 nonfiction book about the Mercury astronauts, for the whole pile, Bonfire<\/em> included. (And I say this knowing full well that there is some quantum of sheer bull in The Right Stuff<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Wolfe continued to insist, returning to the interview already mentioned, that \u201cNonfiction remains the most important literary genre in American literature of the past 60 years.\u201d He still, 20 years on from Bonfire<\/em>, felt the need to half-apologize for abandoning non-fiction. My instinct is that it was indeed a mistake, but I am only a consumer of Wolfe, looking back at the corpus from without: none of us readers had to meet Wolfe\u2019s dry-cleaning bills.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the National Post Colby Cosh explains why Tom Wolfe was so significant in the literary world almost from his first published work: … Tom Wolfe was an educated man: unlike any of the macho novelists he was sparring with, he was entitled to adjoin an honest-to-God PhD to his byline. In the end, he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,13],"tags":[311,477,321,134],"class_list":["post-43458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-usa","tag-1960s","tag-magazines","tag-nyc","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-biW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43458"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43460,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43458\/revisions\/43460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}